Comments on: Bill proposes ISPs, Wi-Fi keep logs for police

The Internet Safety Act would require all providers of an "electronic communication service" to log user accounts for two years for later police convenience.

[tmoore1081]

This is possibly the dumbest idea in the long and sad history of dumb ideas that is the United States Congress.

[Traleous]

This had better never happen. Log files are very small indeed to be sure but its my equipment that it is being stored on. Since PCs that have Wi Fi in there house all over the country will have to keep this info, everyone's personal property will now be able to be searched and taken in order to aid in any federal or local investigation.(Illegal search and seizure? If you want me to explain, I will. Just ask.)
Mix that with the wonderful Patriot act and you now give the government total control of all peoples PC and internet usage.
This is too powerful to be enacted. Public terminal WiFi hotspots should be sufficient and can be kept for investigative purposes. The public WiFi spots that businesses provide should be compensated for saving those files as well. This is yet another mess where the government is trying to curb the flow of information therefore keeping the public in check. This should never be passed in its current form unless you would like to live in a dystopian universe of George Orwell's design. This is just an opinion but to me it leads to many problems with privacy and rights in the future.

Why are so many of you discussing whether democrats or republicans are to blame; or, how hard it would be technically to implement? This is an attempt to create another nonsensical, non-enforceable law, that goes against the constitution. Whether it is technically possible or not, and regardless of whose idea it was, these are just diversions of what the true issue is here: invasion of privacy and loss of personal freedom. I have nothing to hide; but, still don't want the government listening to my every call and watching my every key stroke. The "thought police" (1984) aren't far behind this kind of thinking...

BTW: How is it that everything is now considered terrorism, even child pornography? I think the NSA (and others) think that gives them a blank check, to do whatever they want to invade our privacy, all under the guise of "protecting us from terrorists" or "protecting our children".

That's where your energy should be directed: standing up for your rights. Whether it is technically possible should be the LAST thing we should be discussing; or, whether it was a democrat or republican who thought of this crap.

[hassan_bin_sober]

Republican Dinosaurs! They still don't get it. I only know them as the party of plunder!

[FreedomForever]

This is an outrage! The real enemy of US freedom is not Republicans or Democrats, but the career 20+ year bureaucrat lawyers in the "justice" dept who want to create a surveillance state where the identity, location, and time of activity of all Americans is collected in a database so they can monitor us like Big Brother. Then they can go after people they brand as suspicious, just like in Nazi Germany, Red China, and as was done here by Hoover's FBI under Johnson and Nixon. As usual they will use child pornography or terrorism as the excuse to erode our freedom. Americans must oppose this and keep America free of the police state surveillance and government tyranny that made our founding fathers write the Bill of Rights!!

[Ludjer]

This is stupid

if you let your children use the internet and you dont show them the what to do and what not to do then its your own stupid fault

thank the lord this is America being dumb and here we where hoping for change

the chance that this will ever get to south africa is very, very slim due to the fact that less then 10% of the people here have internet access

[spkrman6]

So many of the comments want to turn this into a Dem vs Repub argument, it makes me sick. Political party has NOTHING to do with it, this is all about suppressing opinions that run counter to the standard media. This is about censorship and control. The internet has poked a big hole in the propaganda machine that the elite ruling class has erected in America, and they are trying desperately to plug it. There is too much TRUTH being spread, and the people are starting to wake up.

[foxale08]

No worries, just log on to your neighbors wiki with a spoofed mac to do illegal things online. When your done, delete the spoofed mac. Even if the cops check the log they cant trace the mac back to you assuming you don't go to any sites that require you to logon.

[foxale08]

wifi* not wiki

[MrGecko]

one thought. how do they propose to make sure this distributed database of all activity secure? computers are getting infected with viruses every day. yeah the police could use the logs, and so could Big Brother, but do we really want to MANDATE that everyone have a peice of the pie, that it would just take a smart and mischevious teenager to write a virus/worm/spyware that collects the pieces and puts them together, and sells it to the higest bidder? how does THAT protect us, or the children?

[Jenniferhul]

How about we that are parents act as if the internet is a tool and not a toy and then the rest of the world can get on with the business of living without having to pay a penalty for people that can't be bothered with keeping track of what their kids are up to.

[inachu]

This law for home users who use wifi is stupid.
There are a few wifi home routers that when logging is turned fully on and everything is checked and you have the wifi firewall turned on then weeks down the road when that log file becomes full then all data in and out bypasses the firewall. Sure it is a bug but I forgot which brand wifi router this affects.

There is no home hardware version that has a large enough storage that would be able to comply with this new law. this would mean every WIFI router would need a hard drive or a solid state hard drive to keep the hardware small.

Many will keep logging turned off also to keep lag to a minimum when playing multiplayer games.

The technology is almost there for home users but the state it is in for retail sales for home users logging of WIFI routers / access points for home use is currently WORTHLESS!

[jallirs]

to anybody who keeps saying that "OHHH WE DONT NEED TO BE WORRIED ABOUT THIS...BLAHBLAHBLAH... SPOOF MY MAC ADDRESSS....BLAHBLAHBLAH..." you're forgetting one thing IPv6. Plus, I'm quite sure there are a multitude of ways to get around even that, by constantly requesting another IP address for instance, but after a while its not really the fact that a bunch of 30 y/o guys with their boxers on who live in their parents basement will be able to get around this, its that this could set the stage for tyranny, (think red scare all over). I think the peope in support of this bill(democrats supported it in 2003 , read the article, its just now for some dumb reason republicans are bringing it back up....) should be the first ones with this measure in place and i think there should be a provision that if the government pays for your internet connection the logs should be availible for public scrutiny.

Seriously, remember all those US congressmen and senetors with "little boy problems"? OR all the senators who claim to take the "moral high ground" when it comes to stuff like this? i think if they want to erase our liberty, why should they have any? Plus itll basically make sure that this never goes down.

[NeedToKnow6969]

Worst part is that most, if not all, personal Wi-Fi units do not have the memory to even consider maintaining logs for one year, much less two, which means that most folks would have to buy a new unit just to try to comply with the law. Additionally, by default no Wi-Fi units track this stuff and as a result you have non-techies that will have to pay someone to come to their home just to configure that part of their wireless router.

Frankly, it seems that "Big Brother" wants to push a "1984" agenda harder than ever under a guise of protecting children. If the Feds are so hot on protecting kids, why haven't they gone and closed all of our borders to stop the trafficking of drugs into the U.S.? Why haven't they gone and pulled down all the possible porn sites that kids can get to everyday from the local library? This has nothing to do with protecting children, it has to do with being able to fully monitor what each of us is saying, thinking, reading, and doing. Its a mechanism for the politicians to use to ensure that we are not going to do something, say something, read something, or think something that could possibly put them in the "wrong light".

[bmallek]

That sounds like Bush again. Thank GOD he's gone!

[crab50]

New service unmasks anonymous cell callers this service is by att and what did they do to their consumers with the government it is also by tmobile and they do gave their consumers up to the government i agree gabeheim this is the government control no matter which party govern
i also agree with the other person that russia is here wake up people your rights and civil liberties are being taken away everyday and only the privacy foundation and someother watchdogs are fight for the undogs where is cry for justice for the masses one day we will open our eyes and we will no longer be america the great free liberty for all there will be 1984 and all the cameras and logs and NO FREEDOM

[FireArmada]

Is it really about the kids? Or is this another way to spy on the people here on our shores? This can not go in to affect! Any one that votes for this should never be let back in office. These people know not of what they do. They should not be allowed to make laws that they can not understand. We would be better off letting the village idiot make all the laws.

[gaspero1]

We should all flood Senator John Cornyn's government email account with our DHCP logs. I bet he isn't bright enough to even understand what is stored in those logs.

[pennyfabricart]

I am ABSOLUTELY in favor of protecting children and concerned adults.

But for a current case-in-point to see how knee-jerk legislation can have enormous unintended consequences:

Look at the Consumer Protection Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA). This legislation has decimated the American-Made small businesses of childrens' products, which by unexpected consequence has put thousands of American small businesses out of business, while consolidating the marketplace for giant Asian companies who can afford the testing requirements, most of those being the companies whose practices prompted the legislation to begin with.

No legislation should be hastened through based on political desires to be seen as "child protectors" if that legislation hasn't been thoroughly reviewed to ascertain that unintended consequences to the US economy which do not conflict with the goals of the legislation, are avoided, and reality-based effective protection is achieved.

The CPSIA sought to protect American children from Asian mass produced goods containing lead, yet its poor fabrication put thousands of compliant American small businesses out of work, and consolidated the market to allow only those same Asian producers to operate within it.

Don't jump at this legislation until its potential repercussions are thoroughly evaluated. It's easy to leap when politicians shout "protect our children!" But short sighted legislation can decimate the markets that our children may rely upon long-term. Protect our children's health and safety, but do it with enough research and foresight to not destroy their rights to privacy or livelihood.

[wfarr18124]

This sucks